Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

211 Pages·2009·1.09 MB·English

by  Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Annie Dillard
Copyright
. Copyright © 1974 by Annie Dillard.
PILGRAIM AT TINKER CREEK
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ePUB Edition © AUGUST 2007 ISBN: 9780061847806
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for Richard
Contents
Copyright
Epigraph
1
Heaven and Earth in Jest
2
Seeing
3
Winter
4
The Fixed
5
Untying the Knot
6
The Present
7
Spring
8
Intricacy
9
Flood
10
Fecundity
11
Stalking
12
Nightwatch
13
The Horns of the Altar
14
Northing
15
The Waters of Separation
Afterword
More Years Afterward
About Annie Dillard
About the Author
Other Books by Annie Dillard
About the Publisher
It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being
kindled and in measures going out.
—HERACLITUS
1
Heaven and Earth in Jest
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open
window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-
awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and
blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully,
arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.
And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw
prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze,
my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this,
and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the
rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The
sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom
or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood
streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined
the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery,
rumors of death, beauty, violence…. “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a
woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you
up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a
curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air
hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim
headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.
I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer
now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is
changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I
wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake
by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks,
or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away.
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An
anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple
sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this
house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at
anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the
current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a
good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s
—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the
continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the
horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the
pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of
perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man
—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of
creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are
giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the
mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The
creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the
mountains are home.

The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a
bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a
bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means
good walking.
If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular
looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled
shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one,
everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water. It carries its own lights. I
set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the flocks fly over, for the woods where
the white mare lives. But I go to the water.
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light
chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow
sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the
planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was
young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on
the globe and sing. All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a
canary on top of his mind, singing.
West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so that the creek is both
in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of
me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening
the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the
pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always flush a rabbit or two
there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun. There
are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just
upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or
down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children,
and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the
steers are there today.
I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom.
They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human
product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes. They have cast-iron shanks and
tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with
other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew.
I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty
cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit
the other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me
and the barbed-wire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an
enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, “Lightning! Copperhead!
Swedish meatballs!” They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I
stand with the wind on my face.
When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a
sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in
the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the
water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level
field I walked through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and
the island is shallow and sluggish. In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes
grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders
patrol the surface film, crayfish hump along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs
shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky